Jeremiah 31: 31–34 / Psalm 46 / Romans 3: 19-28 / John 7: 31–36
This is the written version of the sermon given at Flohr’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) in McKnightstown, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, October 26, 2025 by Fr. Gene Tucker, Interim Pastor.
“THE CHURCH AS GOD’S
TOOL, GOD’S AGENT IN THE WORLD”
(Homily text: Romans 3: 19-28)
Ever think about how important tools
are to living our lives, day in and day out?
For example, if a knife can’t cut, it’s
usefulness is impaired. If a hammer’s handle is broken or cracked, it’d be best
to get it fixed before trying to use it. If a yard stick is broken, it is
useless for trying to measure something.
Without tools, we’d struggle to get
things done. Try driving a nail without a hammer, and it doesn’t work very
well. Try cutting something without a sharp and useful knife, and the result
will be a the same.
OK, perhaps you get the idea.
Now, if we think about it, the Church
is God’s tool, God’s agent in the world. It is one way[1] God
chooses to make His Name known in the world, to give glory to God’s Name, to
bear witness not only to our wayward human behaviors and inclinations, but also
to God’s great mercy and love. The Church is an effective tool when it
faithfully does these things. Put another way, the Church’s purpose is to
connect God to people and people to God, and to nurture that relationship.
But in the time of the Renaissance,
about 500 years ago, the Church was a broken tool.
Many people in Europe saw the lack of
the Church’s usefulness to the ordinary person. (But, by contrast, the clergy
and the monks were doing pretty well.) Some voices dared to raise their
concerns, and many paid a heavy price for doing so. (Look up the account of Jan
Huss’ witness and sacrifice, to cite but one example. Huss lived about 100
years before the Reformation took place.)
The Church, in that day and time,
didn’t bear witness to God. It didn’t share the message that God is a holy,
righteous and judging God, but also a loving, merciful and forgiving God. The
Church’s message was one of harshness, absent any mention of God’s love.
The Church was in love with worldly
power, prestige and wealth. It took the message that God would sit as judge of
all humankind and turned that message into a money-making scheme, selling
Indulgences in order to liberate sinful people from the horrors of Purgatory
and Hell. The resulting inflow of money went to Rome in order to build St.
Peter’s Basilica. (One account of the influx of money from European countries
was that, in England, about one-quarter to one-third of the Gross Domestic
Product was going to Rome each year!)
The Church in that time did little to
educate people about the basics of the Christian faith. After all, their
worship was in Latin, a language that, even in that day, few people understood.
What a sad state of affairs! What a
testimony to the truth that, left to their own devices, human beings can make a
royal mess out of things.
Into this mess, some courageous voices
emerged. Martin Luther was one such voice. On October 31, 1517, he posted a
series of things he wanted to talk about on the church door in Wittenberg,
Germany. Posting such discussions points wasn’t at all unusual, for many in the
seminary there routinely did the same. It was what Luther wanted to talk about
that proved to be provocative.
Luther wanted to talk about God’s
grace, not only about God’s judgment. We know that Luther struggled with his
own sense of sinfulness and unrighteousness before God. But all of the Church’s
remedies for that situation, in his day and time, didn’t offer any relief or
sense that God had forgiven his shortcomings. Luther saw in Holy Scripture (the
Bible) no basis for the selling of Indulgences, realizing that such an
understanding had no basis at all in God’s truth.
So, we know that Luther’s
understandings were greatly helped by reading and studying St. Paul’s Letter to
the early churches in Rome. There – and perhaps in our reading, appointed for
today in chapter three - Luther came to understand that there was nothing he
could do on his own initiative to receive God’s forgiveness and God’s mercy and
love. St. Paul’s explanation offered the reality and the truth that God’s
forgiveness and mercy is God’s gift, pure and simple. It is God’s free gift,
received by faith.
So, Luther came to see this formula:
Scripture alone, Grace alone, Faith alone.
Thus began God’s plan to fix a broken
Church, an impaired witness to God’s nature, completely understood.
The tenets of the Reformation were
these:
1.
That the Church’s worship ought to be in a language that people could
understand;
2. That the lay folk in the Church were
the most important part of the Church, not the least important part; and
3. That people ought to be able read
the Holy Scriptures for themselves.
There’s much more we could say about
all these things. Perhaps, as we look back on the events that Luther (and
others) set in motion, we could reflect on the values that these reformers
maintained. In many ways, we continue to try to understand and to incorporate
those Reformation values in the Church today.
For the continuing reality is that, in
this age and in every age, the Church stands in need of fixing, of reform, in
order that it might be God’s effective tool in the world, bearing witness to
God’s nature and devoted to sharing the Good News (Gospel) of what a difference
knowing God through Christ, personally and deeply, makes in people’s lives.
AMEN.
[1] To be sure, the Church isn’t the only way God can work in the world. And when the Church fails to faithfully carry out its mission and mandate from God, God can work around the Church.
